——
“Civilization, eh? Hey I got something to say about that.”
“Oh really?”
“Yea really. See… it’s all about power, isn’t it? Oops, strike that! It’s about the perception of power. (Of course we are referring to social and political power here, and not the kind of power that keeps the lights on at night.)
Power is influence, right? It’s what tells us what to do. And that most basic form of power, the kind that everyone can relate to… THAT form of power is the kind that includes the threat of violence. Like, do this or you’re gonna die kinda stuff. And no matter if the threat comes from outside or from within, whether it’s a powerful threat, or the power is protecting you from something threatening you (real or perceived) it is about physical safety. It’s about survival.”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s why it works. That’s why we develop systems of power. To keep ourselves safe. To keep on surviving.
Yep… our ancient, closely-related, interconnected family (that this reasonable dude back here has been talking about) survived amazingly powerful natural threats by using our power to work together, to adapt and change.
Whether we were aware of it or not.
And as we left Africa and populated the diverse corners of the planet, we continued to survive and adapt and change. We eventually became as diverse as the places we inhabited.
When keeping to our small, immediate family-based hunter-gatherer or nomadic pastoralist groups, our systems of power were chosen for us. We saw that there were natural forces determining who among us would be the strongest, the most cunning… the most able to keep us safe and fed.
We perceived these people as more connected to those obviously powerful natural forces, so THEY became powerful. We trusted and followed these people. WE made them powerful.
Whether we were aware of it or not.
And we kept on observing those natural forces and following the people those forces chose to lead us, for over fifty thousand years!
Needless to say, we came to trust our understanding of those natural forces very deeply. We developed better tools to protect ourselves from threats, to eat and keep surviving. And we also started developing ideas about the nature of those natural forces. Many of our ideas were about how to use them to make even better tools and feed more of ourselves, and better ways to protect ourselves from the most dangerous of threats to our physical safety.
But we also started developing ideas about why some of us got chosen to have power (that WE gave them) and why some did not.
Around five thousand years ago (or so) we started using our ideas and understanding of natural forces to start building stuff, organizing into stratified social groups, developing more complex languages and (most importantly for this discussion) determining who among us would wield all this new-found power.
And what this new-found power brought with it, was change.
Radical change!
See… the progeny of those strong and cunning leaders, figured out that they could use this new-found power to… ”
“Yes, the power of ideas. Let me just say a bit more about that.”
“Sure Dude, this is an open conversation. Fire away.”
“Thank you umm… man.”
“No problemo.”
“Fine.”
——
To be continued…
m(___)m
